I wasn’t always in love with Colton Calloway; I was in love with his younger brother, Kyle, first. Kyle was my first one true love, my first in every way. Then, one stormy August night, he died, and the person I was died with him.

Colton didn’t teach me how to live. He didn’t heal the pain. He didn’t make it okay. He taught me how to hurt, how to not be okay, and, eventually, how to let go.

My Rating: 2 stars

My Thoughts:

I had heard really great things about this book and so I set my expectations high, but unfortunately I was pretty much just left disappointed.

Okay, first I’ll start with what I liked. If you read the blurb of the book then you already know that the girl Nell lost her first love Kyle. So for the first third or so of the book we get the whole story and romance of Nell and Kyle, leading up to his death. I loved this part of the story. Their romance started out sweet and innocent since they were inseparable friends since birth. Kyle’s death was horribly tragic and just tore my heart apart. I could even fathom the pain that Nell felt having to face it all.

That being said, I did really like Nell’s character, at least for the most part. From knowing what she had to endure and the memories that she kept with her, I felt that I really knew the depth of her pain and could understand why she was so broken. The fact that she was able to find peace and love with Colton was heartwarming. Colton I kind of liked but then again not really. I mean he was good for Nell and they helped each other heal old, painful wounds that plagued them both. I just could get out of my head the picture of him living the “thug” life from his past which, to be honest, killed anything swoon-worthy about him.

Now, what I didn’t like and really couldn’t get past were two things. First, there was this one scene were Colton goes apeshit on this other guy. To be fair, he had a very good reason but he literally beat the guy to an inch of his life and may have even killed him and then everyone just kind of went on as if it wasn’t a big deal…it was just weird. The second thing I couldn’t get past was the ending. About 20 pages before the end a huge bomb was dropped and then 5 pages later my head was reeling and I was thinking “what the hell?” because I definitely didn’t expect that to happen in literally 5 pages…again, weird. And after everything was all said and done and some tears are shed, everyone just acted like none of it was a big deal again! Too much just happened WAY too quickly. It was a little ridiculous.

In the end, for me the bad outweighed the good because I just couldn’t get over those two parts, which stinks because it definitely had potentially especially with the characters.